


Random Factors

by thisbluespirit



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angels, Community: 100fandoms, Community: 51pluscrossoverfandoms, Cows, Crossover, Curses, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:20:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29271639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/pseuds/thisbluespirit
Summary: Aziraphale gets caught out while keeping his side of the Arrangement.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31
Collections: Gen Prompt Bingo Round 18, The 100 Multifandom Challenge, The 51 Plus Crossover Fandoms Challenge





	Random Factors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AstroGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Stars and Wheat and Apples and Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140738) by [AstroGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl). 



> Written for genprompt_bingo square "Someone calls in a favour", 100fandoms prompt #18 (fix) and 51pluscrossoverfandoms prompt #16 (dishonour).

“Are you an angel?”

Aziraphale jumped. He had been focusing all his being on a straggling lone puppy limping along outside the cow byre, attempting to bless it. Just in passing, nothing worth speaking of, but it was a small salve against what he was about to do. He had to repress a minute wince at the knowledge that soon it would become something he had _done_. He wasn’t at all sure Crowley had been playing fair with this one. Well, not that one should expect a demon to play fair but… Aziraphale did.

He turned his attention to the speaker, now that the puppy was miraculously bounding off away towards the nearby peasant’s cottage. It was a teenaged girl, sitting on the stone wall behind him, munching savagely away on an apple. Her face was grubby and she smelled faintly of animal dung, although her boyish clothes looked somehow wrong for the time of the century. Aziraphale bristled. The apple seemed somehow much too on the nose for the occasion.

“I am,” he said, since he had been caught out, wings spread mid-blessing, and anyway, older humans rarely believed younger ones when they told tall tales about celestial beings, so it would probably be all right. “Well, er, spotted, young lady.”

The girl took another bite of her apple, her cheeks bulging for a moment before she swallowed. “Oh. Only I never thought angels were actually _real_.”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure how to respond to that, because obviously he was real, but since it would be much better if nobody knew he had been here, he didn’t feel that it was time for a theological debate on the subject. In the end he went with, “Do you mind not speaking with your mouth full?”

She tried to laugh and cough at the same time and wound up spitting out half-chewed apple – not an improvement. Then she straightened herself and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, dropping the remaining apple into the grass. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, your, um, angelic highness. My name’s Vicki. What were you doing to that cowshed anyway?”

Aziraphale drew himself up to say something about the business of heaven or maybe ineffability and then remembered why he was really here and that his work was neither angelic nor ineffable and sagged. “If you must know – I’ve come to curse that poor cow.”

Vicki looked at Aziraphale. He stared back. They both looked at the cow. It returned the compliment and gave a melancholy moo.

“But why? What’s it done to you?”

“I expect it’s a mercy. In disguise. Besides, it might be a very wicked cow. You never know.” 

“Yes, but _you_ ought to, if you’re going to curse it. I think it’s completely unfair of you! It’s that poor old lady’s only cow and now you’re going to make it barren or drop dead of the lurgy or something? That doesn’t seem very angelic to me.” Vicki paused and then added, carefully, “Begging your pardon. Are you sure you’re an angel?”

“Yes!” Aziraphale thought about that, and then about trying to explain that, technically, today he might be a demon and then instead how preferable it would be to curse a certain demon he knew instead of some poor old lady’s cow. He was quite shocked at Crowley. He didn’t think this was his kind of thing, either. “Poor old lady’s only cow, you say?”

Vicki nodded. “Can’t you curse somebody else’s cow?”

“Well,” said Aziraphale. “That would merely be unfair to a different cow and I promised someone I would come here and curse that cow. I won’t do anything very bad. Just – maybe spoil her milk a bit.” Which was bad enough. Aziraphale didn’t have strong feelings about cows as such, but he did about the uses to which humans put their milk. Cheese, for instance. Cheese was one of the best inventions humans had ever come up with, and there was also much to be said for yoghurt on the right occasion, and then there was cream. And if you had cream, you could have – even in his mind Aziraphale awarded it a capital letter and hushed tones – _Syllabub_. Not that peasants probably had syllabub anyway, but they certainly liked cheese a lot. Otherwise all they got in this region was bread and the occasional bacon rind.

Vicki hopped off the wall. “Look,” she said, and pointed at the next field, “see over there? Sir Ralph owns all those cows – well, there must be about a hundred! I’m sure you could just tell whoever it was that sent you that you got confused. That is a lot of cows to choose from, after all. Besides, Sir Ralph is awful and would never notice if one cow got cursed. Of course,” she added, “it would still be a bit mean to whichever cow you chose, but if it gives sour milk for a bit, I don’t suppose it’ll matter much.”

“Oh?” said Aziraphale, who had the feeling that he was now being tempted, or tested, and wasn’t sure exactly where an angel filing in for a demon stood in this kind of matter. “I suppose – well, I suppose I _could_ say that.”

As it turned out, where this angel stood was on the other side of the hedge, cursing one anonymous cow amongst a whole herd while Vicki hovered nearby and told him what the dreadful Sir Ralph had done to her friends, and didn’t angels fight evil people like him? 

“What’s it like being an angel?” she asked, changing tack just as he resolved to ignore her, which was proving quite difficult. He closed his eyes and Did The Dread Cursing, giving a shudder. Cheeses and cream that now would never be passed through his mind.

Vicki was staring at him when he opened his eyes. “Are you sure you’re an angel?” she asked again. “Because that felt –” She shivered and hugged her arms in around herself. “I don’t know, but I felt pretty sick for a minute.”

“Yes, I am. Except, well, sometimes one has to do things that aren’t very angelic. For reasons of, well, honour and things like that,” Aziraphale said. “Although having said that, I would be awfully grateful if you never mentioned this to anyone else.” 

“What else you can do? Because if I’m going to keep your secret, then you owe me. And you remember what I said about my friends and what Sir Ralph is going to do with them –?”

It was such a relief to be able to do good that Aziraphale, on reflection, might at that point have agreed to things that he possibly should not have agreed to. She was a rather persuasive human. It was almost a shame that Crowley had passed this task to him. He wondered what his demon associate would have done. He rather suspected it might not have been so very different in the end, although that was a thought better not examined too hard.

Luckily, since agreeing very soon involved having to miracle them both out of a rapidly burning manor house to a safe place on the other side of the tall stone wall the encircled Sir Ralph’s estate, he didn’t have much more time for thinking.

“How did all this get here with us?”

Aziraphale only then noticed that there were several illuminated volumes scattered on the grass around them, in addition to two bowls of syllabub. Oh dear. Well, he had been rather distracted when he’d got them out. It was hardly to be wondered at that he’d gone a bit overboard on the miracles. Probably a natural angelic reaction to cursing innocent cows. 

“No point in needlessly burning books.”

Vicki picked up the bowl and sniffed it. “Yes, but where did these come from? We were in the library!”

“It was somewhat on my mind,” said Aziraphale, with a lofty wave of his hand, and hoped she would assume that angels miracled syllabub all the time and the literature had failed to mention it, like a lot of other things. “You may have one.”

“Thanks.” She picked it up. “I am hungry. I was hiding out in that cow byre all night.”

“That does explain rather a lot.”

Vicki dipped her finger in, licked it, and pulled a face.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Well, it’s all right,” she said. “I’ve had better. Where I come from, my favourite dessert is the one where you take some ice cream, coconut, chocolate and oh, I don’t think the other ingredients have been invented yet – well, that doesn’t matter. What a shame you didn’t bring a spoon.”

Aziraphale looked down at his hand, in which there coincidentally happened to be a small silver spoon, and handed it over.

“Goodness,” said Vicki, looking at him as if that was the most impressive thing he’d done that day. “You really are an angel.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I suggest you eat your syllabub. Unless you feel like telling me where it is you come from?”

“Oh,” said Vicki, tucking in with her spoon and bending over it hard enough that he couldn’t see her face, “you know, this is pretty nice after all.”

“I thought not somehow.” Aziraphale wasn’t sure why she felt so wrong. It wasn’t a feeling he’d had very often, although he had encountered it from time to time, usually in the vicinity of much more mysterious beings. Vicki, however, was undoubtedly human and neither angelic nor demonic except when she was both. The more he looked at her, the more out of place she felt to him. Her aura seemed to bend the world around her in a way he didn’t understand.

Vicki finished her syllabub and put the bowl down before turning to face him. “Would you bless me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She turned pink and shrugged. “Well, I don’t think I’ll ever meet another angel, and I could probably use it. My friends and I get into trouble a lot.”

“It’s not that simple. You do have to believe, you know.”

Vicki held up her spoon. “I do.”

Aziraphale nodded. He put aside the minor issues of the wrongs and rights of cursing cows and burning down manor houses (regardless of how wicked their owners might be) and contemplated a major issue: one human soul. One especially mystifying human soul – but, then again, weren’t they all?

“Have you done it yet?”

“No! And I’m not sure I will if you don’t exhibit some semblance of the virtues of patience and silence while I try.”

Vicki gave a laugh and then a nod, and closed her eyes, and waited.

Aziraphale called upon heaven and the growing grass of the earth, the clear air around them, and the sweetness of syllabub, and the relief of peasants left uncursed and let it fall on Vicki, having in return the quite impossible sense of someone who had not yet been born, a child of the stars, and at the same time a queen who had died hundreds of years ago. He wasn’t entirely sure at the end who had blessed whom.

“Oh,” said Vicki, in what he felt to be at last a properly reverential tone, “you really _are_ , aren’t you?”

Aziraphale put up his hand. “Shh. I hear your friends calling. I think you should leave before anything else burns down, don’t you?” As she scrambled to her feet, he added, more worriedly, “And don’t forget not to mention me!”

* * *

“So, how did it go with the cow? Shouldn’t have been too hard. Just, you know, a cow.”

“The cow? Was there a cow? Oh, yes. Oh, no problem at all, really.”

Crowley’s voice rose a notch. He sounded disbelieving. “You didn’t have a problem with cursing that poor peasant’s cow?”

“I’m afraid I can’t possibly discuss the details of that one, not with a demon.” Aziraphale stared ahead. “A cow was cursed, yes.” His expression brightened. “And then there was syllabub.”

“Right,” said Crowley, eying him warily. “I’m not going to get into trouble with head office for this one, am I?”

“Oh, no. There was even –” Aziraphale lowered his voice – “wilful destruction of property. Fire. Minor chaos. That kind of thing. And, I promise, I did curse a cow.”

He didn’t mention that the moral equation involved had been so complicated that he was pretty sure it would need long division or maybe even the one where they used letters instead of numbers and at least a few centuries to work it out.

Almost as much a conundrum as other things, like both his partners in this particular crime.


End file.
